This guy HAD to know he was going to get nabbed someday, right? On Thursday, retired New York Police Department sergeant Ralph Mastrantonio was convicted of operating an illegal gambling house on Staten Island. The venue, dubbed “5th Street,” was located in a gym on Arthur Kill Road.
According to the New York Daily News report, an investigation that led to Mastrantonio’s arrest began in 2011 after the Queens district attorney’s office was advised that an NYPD detective was hanging out in gambling dens with members of organized crime families. An undercover detective set out to get inside those games and successfully did so, making his way to the table in six different poker dens. The Arthur Kill game, in particular, reportedly raked thousands of dollars a night.
Seriously, thousands of dollars in rake every night. That is one hell of a poker game. The people involved in operating these games had to know that was illegal and had to realize that it wasn’t going to last forever. In fact, Richard Palase, the detective who was the original target of the investigation, told Brooklyn Magistrate Judge Ramon Reyes, “I knew that doing it was illegal,” when he pleaded guilty in February.
At least they served free Italian food at the poker games. Maybe their defense teams should have claimed they were simply running an expensive Italian restaurant that just happened to spread free poker games. I am not a lawyer (despite my mother’s suggestion that, at 39-years old, I could still get my law degree), but that is totally the approach I would have taken.
Palase sounds like a real piece of work, too. The Daily News reported that he had his bail temporarily revoked in December when firefighter Michael Bergen, one of the other men arrested in the probe, told prosecutors that Palase threatened to kill him. When the two ran into each other in the street, Palase kept shouting, “You’re dead,” at Bergen and made a throat-slash gesture. Palase claimed he was just rubbing a rash on his neck. Judge Sandra Townes called bullshit on him.
Also charged were Bergen’s father, retired firefighter James Bergen, and mortician Joseph Fumando, whose nickname is “The Undertaker,” even though that is not so much a nickname as it is another term for his job.
There were other colorful characters involved in the poker games, including such upstanding gentlemen as “Handsome Mike,” “Porky Joe,” and “Joe the Beef.” No word as of yet if anyone named “Chicken Joe,” “Joe the Turkey,” or “Tofu Joe” were present at any of the poker games.
Despite the original thought that Palase was fraternizing with organized crime-types, there does not appear to be evidence of ties to such people. The New York Daily News, though, quoted a source as saying, “However, it would be highly unlikely that [an] illegal gambling location would not be paying tribute to organized crime so they could keep on operating.”
